It’s a pleasure to welcome Wendall Thomas as guest blogger today. Wendall’s fourth Cyd Redondo mystery is Cheap Trills. In Cheap Trills, Thomas sends Cyd to Bali in another fun adventure. When I reviewed the book a month ago, though (https://bit.ly/3sbAor4), I didn’t mention Tupperware. Wendall gets to talk to you about that. Thank you, Wendall.

Cyd Redondo and the Balinese Tupperware Network

by Wendall Thomas

“Initially, my husband refused to let me sell Tupperware even part-time. Now he works for me.”
Ms. Amelia, Tupperware Regional Manager, Jakarta
If you’ve read any of the Cyd Redondo screwball mysteries, you know that my Brooklyn travel
agent is a sucker for Tupperware. She finds its resilience and “burpable seal”indispensible for
her own carry-on luggage, and in fact, gives her clients mini “nesting sets” with their plane and
cruise tickets.
Someone recently asked me at a reading,“What’s up with the Tupperware?”
I think I gave Cyd her obsession partly because I use Tupperware when I travel, but maybe,
subconsciously, it went deeper. Tupperware, from its very inception, has been a symbol of
female entrepreneurship and a way of creating a community. Plus, it’s famous for “bouncing
back.” So, it represents a lot of who Cyd is at heart.
Tupperware was invented by Dupont employee Earl Tupper, from black, inflexible pieces
of polyethylene slag—a waste product of the oil refining process used during WWII. He purified
and molded it to create the iconic lightweight, non-breakable containers.
But the person who invented the idea of “house parties” and of using 1950s housewives as the
work force was a woman named Brownie Wise. She was a single mother who helped to develop
the “party plan marketing system” for a company called Stanley Home Products. After she was
told by its owner that “management was no place for a woman,” she left and was eventually
hired by Tupper. She convinced him to take Tupperware out of retail outlets and use “direct
marketing” exclusively, and the Tupperware Party was born.
She was the one who first filled a Tupperware bowl with liquid and threw it across the room, and
also the one who invented “carrot calling,” where Tupperware saleswomen urged their friends
(and potential customers) to take two carrots, keep one in Tupperware and one in their regular
crisper for a week. I think you can imagine which approach won.
Tupperware parties became a way for housewives at the time to earn independent income
without officially working outside their homes, and in many ways, it carried the seeds of the
revolution for women’s rights that really took hold in the 1970s.
It was also important because Wise was one of the first women to rise to an executive position in
corporate America, and also to suffer a tragic, and dramatic, fall. If you’re interested in Wise, I
highly recommend the book Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built,
and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire by Bob Kealing.

When I was considering Bali as a location, my final decision came down to two things. First, the
fourth book was due to be set in early 2007, just as Eat, Pray, Love came out in paperback, and
second, because I found that, since the early 2000s, Indonesia has been the largest global market
for Tupperware. The idea of Cyd’s finding a Tupperware compatriot in Bali was just too good to
pass up.
Over the past 20 years, Tupperware parties have had the same impact on women in Indonesia
that they had on women in the US in the 50s and 60s—offering an opportunity for them to earn
independent income and become a part of the workforce, whether their husbands know about it
or not. By 2015, Tupperware’s sales force in Southeast Asia reached 250,000, garnering sales of
more than $200 million.
Joe Cochrane wrote in the New York Times,”The company—whose business model is built on
tapping into social networks—has also piggybacked on an Indonesian tradition, called an arisan,
or “gathering,” in which women regularly meet with a set group of friends to catch up on family
news, the latest recipes and neighborhood scuttlebutt. . . the arisans often serve as informal
banks, with women pooling their money and giving the pot to one participant per gathering.”
In Cheap Trills, I send Cyd Redondo to her first Balinese Tupperware party. This is what she
says about it: “ I could hear Indonesian and Balinese, but no English. I might miss most of what
was said, but under the squeal of children and the squawking of birds, I could hear a language I
did understand—the reassuring burp of Tupperware. It didn’t matter that there were no credenzas
and too much rice, these were my people.”
The Tupperware network later helps rescue Cyd and the Bali starling chicks she’s trying to
protect, from a group of ruthless poachers. I think Brownie Wise would be proud.

CHEAP TRILLS Logline:
After her mother secretly books an Eat, Pray, Love tour to Bali through a rival agency and winds
up a murder suspect, travel agent Cyd Redondo battles snake removal experts, songbird
smugglers and thieving monkeys, commandeers a funicular railway, and infiltrates an
underground Tupperware network, all while trying to keep three hungry, endangered Bali
starling chicks alive in her purse.

WENDALL’S BIO:
Lost Luggage, the first book in Wendall Thomas’s Cyd Redondo series, was a Macavity and
Lefty finalist for Best Debut Mystery, Drowned Under received an Anthony nomination for Best
Paperback Original and Drowned Under and Fogged Off were Lefty finalists for Best Humorous
Mystery. Her short fiction appears in the crime anthologies Ladies Night, Last Resort, Murder-a-
Go-Go’s, and Crime Under the Sun. She also teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA and
lectures internationally on screenwriting.

BUY LINK: https://amzn.to/3PVPuc1

Wendall Thomas’ website is https://www.wendallthomas.com/